What Americans don’t get about the first US pope

For the first time in history, the pope is an American — from Chicago, no less. And like many Americans, Pope Leo XIV seems to love a good yap. Whether it concerns President Donald Trump’s immigration policies or the use of artificial intelligence in popular entertainment, Leo has not been shy about expressing his views (he recently said he uses a different starting word every day when playing the New York Times’s Wordle game.)

An American pope speaking about American issues, and in a manner that at least seems to be an implicit criticism of the American president, would be big news in any era. But at a moment when “tradcath” converts to Catholicism are increasingly influential — and increasingly angry about what they see as the Vatican’s turn to “wokeness” — I thought there would be part